The Darkest Night

By Jonathan Mahler

Published: October 5, 2003

Officer Wilton Sekzer was in the living room of his apartment in Sunnyside, Queens, on the night of July 13, 1977, when his lights went out. On the way to check his fuse box, he peeked out the window. The whole block was dark. Sekzer ran up three flights to his roof. He looked to the west, across the East River, to Manhattan. The familiar shapes of the world's most famous skyline were all blotted out by darkness. ''Holy cripes,'' Sekzer muttered to himself. ''There's no lights anywhere.'' Figuring he'd be needed, minutes later he was in his car, heading for work.

Sekzer's command, the 83rd Precinct in Bushwick, Brooklyn, was five miles away from the cheerful streets of Sunnyside. Driving in the darkness, the heavy air pushing through the open windows of his Chrysler Cordova, he remembered where he'd been in 1965, the last time the city was blacked out -- the Mekong Delta, as a 21-year-old helicopter door gunner.

Sekzer had been sent to the 83rd from Emergency Services in the summer of '75, when the city's fiscal crisis forced the Police Department to lay off thousands of officers. He had only narrowly escaped being ''indefinitely furloughed'' himself. Instead, he was transferred, as were most cops working in specialty-crime divisions like Emergency Services. Down 5,000 officers at a time of soaring crime in New York, the city's undermanned precincts, particularly those that served the roughest neighborhoods, needed all the beat cops the department could muster.

The turreted, Victorian-era station house of the 83rd Precinct was surrounded by buckling tenements and seedy bodegas, its red-brick facade buried beneath layers of grime. Sekzer checked in with the desk officer, who was still waiting for a callback from Police Headquarters about whether off-duty cops were going to be activated. He went down to the tin-ceilinged basement, the ''lounge'' -- a couple of old sofas and a black-and-white TV -- to kill time. When he came back upstairs a few minutes later, the word had come down: all officers were to report for duty. He was now on the clock. ''The desk officer told me to stay loose,'' recalls Sekzer, a barrel-chested man of about 5 feet 10 inches, with jowly cheeks and rheumy hazel eyes. ''He said I might be going over to Manhattan to protect the big money.''

A little while later, the owner of a big furniture store in Bushwick burst through the station-house doors in a rage. What the hell is going on? They're looting my business on Broadway, and you bastards are standing here?

''This guy is screaming and screaming and I don't blame him,'' Sekzer tells me on a Friday night last fall at a reunion of the Eight-Three in an American Legion Hall on Long Island, where I spoke with a dozen police officers who worked the 1977 blackout. ''Then the precinct captain walks up right behind him and says: 'All right, everybody in four-man cars. Go forth and do good.'''

The 83rd precinct was not exactly a desirable assignment in 1977. The neighborhood it served was in the grip of extreme poverty. Some 40 percent of its roughly 100,000 residents were on public assistance; 80 percent were unemployed. Half of Bushwick's families were living on less than $4,000 a year, and its infant-mortality rate was the highest in New York City. Yet somehow its problems had gone largely overlooked. The South Bronx, Harlem, Brownsville -- these were New York's ghettos, the symbols of a city in distress, not Bushwick.

The neighborhood's decline had been as sudden as it was steep. In the 1950's and early 60's, as postwar optimism began to give way to white flight and urban blight all over Brooklyn, Bushwick remained predominantly Italian and stubbornly working class. The majority of its housing stock, yellow-brick or three-story wood-frame row houses built for German immigrants before 1910, was handsome, if not fancy, and between its 11 breweries, knitting mills and other light manufacturing plants, Bushwick was less dependent on the dying Navy Yard for jobs than much of the borough.

But Bushwick could postpone its fate only for so long. By the late 1960's, a time of increasing unemployment, the Italians had started to move out, and Hispanics and blacks, many of whom were on public assistance, had started to move in. Sensing an opportunity, local real-estate agents began calling white homeowners to stoke their fears about the influx of minorities, warning them to sell before it was too late. The houses were often snapped up on the cheap by real-estate ''speculators,'' who stuffed them full of families on welfare, exploiting their housing subsidies to drive up rents for working people. Local banks soon stopped granting mortgages and home-improvement loans for the area. After demolishing several blocks' worth of homes in 1968, the city delayed for nearly a decade its plan to build four housing projects, an elementary school, a community center and a park, leaving a yawning hole in the heart of Bushwick.

Amid all of this, an ongoing epidemic of arson was laying siege to the neighborhood. Over the previous two years, there had been 4,000 fires in Bushwick. Some were set by landlords who were tired of trying to evict delinquent tenants; some were set by vandals who intended to return for the plumbing system, which was easier to extract and resell once the firemen had knocked down the walls; some were set by families who knew that Social Services was obligated to provide new housing and moving expenses to victims of disastrous combustions. In most cases, the fires were unstoppable. Half of Bushwick's houses were made of wood, and many were designed with air shafts over their stairwells, meaning that once they started to burn, they went up like furnaces. Not that the dying neighborhood didn't have its own haunting beauty. ''You'd be out fighting a fire until dawn,'' remembers one local fireman, ''and riding back to the firehouse you'd notice that there were fewer and fewer buildings. Then you'd start noticing the churches. Bushwick had a lot of churches. And the houses weren't blocking the view anymore.''

Bushwick's crime rates were soaring, too. Both the number of robberies and the incidents of grand larceny doubled in the early 70's. Many truck drivers insisted on police escorts while making deliveries in the neighborhood; some store owners wore firearms on their hips. In 1976, the Eight-Three had confronted more criminal activity than any other precinct in central Brooklyn. One block was so bad that two radio cars were required to respond to any call there. One cop would stay behind to protect the cars, the other three would enter the building in question -- their guns always drawn. The neighborhood was now mostly Hispanic and black, while the police force was predominantly white. As one veteran of the Eight-Three put it, ''Our job was about arresting minorities.''

Rookies were taught a few important lessons when they reported for duty at the Eight-Three. Don't walk too close to buildings, lest someone drop a brick on you. Don't let neighborhood kids wear your hat (lice). Always check the earpiece on call boxes before using it (dog excrement).

Unlike Sekzer, Officer Robert Locklear was already on duty when the lights went out. A heat wave had descended on New York, and he remembers that people were hanging out on Broadway, Bushwick's main strip, playing cards, drinking beer, trying vainly to catch a flutter of breeze. Now and then, a train would rumble across the elevated tracks overhead, momentarily drowning out the sounds of salsa and disco emanating from the boom boxes below. Locklear, one of a small group of minority cops in the Eight-Three, and his partner had collared a murder suspect earlier in the evening -- they found the guy frying chicken with his door open at the top of a tenement stairwell, the dead body in plain view at the foot of the stairs -- and were hoping the rest of the shift would be relatively quiet.

Locklear can't remember what he heard first, the sound of shattering glass or the store alarms. But he'll never forget what he saw when he looked down the block moments later -- what seemed to be literally thousands of people materializing in the darkness. A local woman called the Police Department in a panic: ''They're coming across Broadway like a herd of buffalo.''

Cops gathering at the Eight-Three station house found it dark; the batteries were missing from the emergency floodlights that were supposed to kick in the moment power went out. ''Hats, bats and jeans'' -- riot helmets, billy clubs and dungarees -- were the norm.

Officers were assigned to ''combat cars'' of four men, using every marked and unmarked vehicle at the precinct's disposal. They were ghetto cops; no one had to tell them to expect the worst. ''This wasn't Park Avenue,'' Sekzer says. ''This was the jungle. You could bet there was going to be gunfire.''

Still, they were not prepared for what greeted them on Broadway. According to one police report, the looting started at 9:40, only six minutes after the onset of darkness. Marauding bands were sawing open padlocks. They were taking crowbars to steel shutters, prying them open like tennis-can tops, or simply jimmying them up with jacks. They were punching through plate-glass windows to grab the clothed mannequins inside. They filled cars, vans, trucks, U-Hauls, or simply carried their loot -- sofas, television sets, refrigerators -- on their backs or in their arms.

The most expensive shops were hit first: jewelry, electronics and furniture stores. A teenager attached a chain to the bumper of a stolen truck and tore off the gates of a luxury-item shop called Time Credit. He pitched a garbage pail through the window and filled the truck with TV's, air-conditioners and a rack of watches. After helping a fellow looter load a couch onto the roof of his station wagon, the teenager sped off.

The elevated tracks that ran above Broadway obscured the scant moonlight. In the dark, the cops started wading into the thick knots of people and making arrests. ''You just grabbed 'em,'' says Locklear, who was patrolling the streets in a beat-up gypsy cab. ''There were plenty of them to grab.''

Often, the looter would drop the merchandise and run the moment he saw a cop approaching. The cop would give chase. If he managed to catch up with the looter, he'd tackle him, handcuff him and go back to pick up the evidence, if it was still there. Now he had to get his prisoner, and the stolen property, back to the station house. Short on vehicles and long on perps, it was necessary to improvise. ''I saw cars pull up at the station house,'' says one Bushwick cop on duty that night. ''They'd pull four prisoners out of the back, open up the trunk and pull two or three more out of there.''

Robert Curvin and Bruce Porter, co-authors of ''Blackout Looting!'' a Ford Foundation-sponsored study, divided the looters into three categories: the professional criminals who were the first to start pillaging, the ''alienated adolescents'' who soon joined in and the poor and not so poor who either got caught up in the excitement or were motivated by ''abject greed.''

Off-duty cops were slowly rolling into the Eight-Three. They were aided by the nearby 81st Precinct, which shared responsibility for Broadway. Officers who didn't have riot helmets were given air-raid helmets and sent out into the streets. Some cops, like Sekzer, just assumed they'd be needed. Others were responding to the call-up order from Police Commissioner Michael J. Codd, who had gone on the radio shortly after darkness descended on the city to instruct all officers to report immediately for duty. Codd had told them to head to their nearest precincts, which were often miles away from the areas where they were needed most. Many cops were eventually bused to so-called high-hazard precincts, but plenty of others simply pretended not to have heard Commissioner Codd's order. Morale in the department had been plummeting since the '75 layoffs, and Mayor Abraham Beame's recent threat to put one cop in each patrol car in half the city's precincts as a further cost-cutting measure had only made matters worse. When the looting peaked between midnight and 4 a.m., some 10,000 cops, 40 percent of the force who were neither on vacation nor on sick leave, had yet to check in.

At the station house, there was no time for paperwork. All the stolen merchandise was initially piled up in the property room. When that was full, it was redirected to a designated area outside the station where an officer stood guard. Polaroids were snapped of the cop with his collar. Information relating to the crime was scribbled on the back. The perp was shoved into a holding cell, and the arresting officer headed back out into the mayhem. Ordinarily, prisoners were taken to downtown Brooklyn for processing, but the message had come down that all suspects were to be detained in the precincts in which they were arrested in order to conserve manpower on the streets and relieve pressure at Central Booking.

During the civil disturbances of the 1960's, rioters spared black merchants with the foresight to mount a ''Soul Brother'' sign in their windows. During the blackout looting of '77, being black-owned offered no protection. As the night wore on, some merchants started turning up to defend their property, but because most of them had moved out of the neighborhood years earlier, everything was already gone by the time they got to their stores.

At one point, Sekzer and his partners followed a group of looters into a furniture store. It was pitch-black inside. The cops walked through with their flashlights but saw no one. There was a staircase leading downstairs in the back. Walking down to the basement, Sekzer heard voices. A lot of voices. There were at least 30 people down there. ''We're all thinking the same thing,'' Sekzer recalls. ''I'm not shooting anybody over this. If they come running at us to try and get out, then take care, send me a postcard.''

The officers told the offending mob that they were under arrest. Now the question was how to get them back to the station house. Sekzer and another cop went upstairs to commandeer a city bus. They managed to flag one down. The bus stopped, the door opened and a police captain leaned out. ''What the hell is your problem?'' he asked.

The bus was filled with a detail of cops on their way to Brooklyn's Central Command for reassignment. Unable to find a vehicle large enough to transport the mob of looters, Sekzer went back to the furniture store to confer with his partners. They decided to bring the women and children upstairs and let them go and then called for squad cars to come and pick up the men.

Bullets, as well as bricks and bottles, were now raining down on the officers from rooftops. Many of the cops remember using their guns repeatedly, usually with the intention of clearing hostile crowds and scaring off snipers, though in the following days there was an unspoken understanding among both the officers and their superiors that no one would claim to have fired his pistol. (For the record, the city reported that only two officers discharged their weapons that night, in one case accidentally.) Some cops recall that Emergency Services vans combed the streets of Bushwick, tossing out extra boxes of ammunition to officers in need. One cop says that he and his partner shot on the order of 130 rounds into the air. Another recalls talking to a shaken transit cop who had defended a token booth at an elevated subway stop by running back and forth between the two entrances, firing his pistol to keep the looters at bay.

At a little after midnight, word spread that John and Al's, a sporting-goods store on Broadway that sold firearms, was under siege. Just about every officer in Bushwick headed straight for it. They showed up in time to arrest 17 looters, but dozens of guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition were already gone. At least some baseball bats had been left behind. One cop tells me that he grabbed a Louisville Slugger to replace his nightstick, which he had already broken on a looter. The cops secured the location and turned it over to one owner, who remained the rest of the night with a high-caliber rifle.

In the Bushwick area, the arrests peaked at about 1:30 a.m. By then, there were two shifts' worth of cops -- 4 to midnight and midnight to 8 -- out on the street. The Eight-Three's holding cells, which were designed to accommodate one prisoner, had upward of 10 in each. When they couldn't squeeze in another body, cops handcuffed prisoners to radiators, to benches, to tables, to one another. (One preferred method was to cuff five prisoners in a line, then cuff the last guy to the first guy's ankles.) The rest were stuffed into a small courtyard next to the station house.

By 2 a.m., the dispatcher was only reporting 10-30's and 10-13's -- robberies in progress and officers needing assistance. Several cops remember being instructed to stop arresting looters. Even though they weren't hanging around to process their collars, the arrests were taking them off the streets for too long. Besides, the station house was running out of room for prisoners.

So instead, cops cracked shins or gave looters ''turbans'' (cop-speak for a bloody head wrapped in a towel or bandage). ''You just wanted to stop the riot, so you beat up the looters with ax handles and nightsticks,'' recalls Robert Knightly, a bearded veteran of the Eight-Three who is now a defense attorney for Legal Aid. ''You beat 'em up and left them in the street. You catch them looting, you just smacked them down and left them.''

Knightly chased one looter who was carrying a love seat. He caught up to the perp and knocked him down. The looter popped right up, as if attached to a spring. ''I'm not like these people: I've got a job,'' he barked. ''Oh, yeah?'' Knightly answered. ''Is today your day off?''

The station house was in chaos. When cops needed a breather, they'd drive a few blocks toward the Queens border, which was eerily quiet.

Several officers recall being told to remove their shields and nameplates. The shields gave the looters a target to shoot at in the darkness. As for the nameplates: ''They wanted this thing over as quickly as possible, and they didn't want anyone worrying about being identified,'' one cop says. The cop who had taken the Louisville Slugger broke it on a looter and yanked a metal riser out of the stairwell of an abandoned building to use as his new nightstick. It got him through the remainder of the night.

One officer remembers seeing a looter running around under a building like an outfielder trying to get under a fly ball. ''We were saying, 'No, no way he's going to do this.''' He did. A love seat came crashing down on top of him from above. The looters were attacking one another, too. According to one police report, a man was loading a van full of stolen merchandise on Broadway. He offered an onlooker $100 to help. The onlooker declined. But as soon as the van was full, the onlooker stabbed the driver, took the keys to the van and drove off.

Officer Frank Cammarata remembers chasing another looter up to the roof of a six-story furniture store with a few other officers. One thing led to another, and the looter went over the edge. A tree broke his fall. He looked up from the pavement, gave the officers the finger and hobbled away.

By 3 a.m., the only hospital in the precinct, Wyckoff Heights, was a madhouse. A police administrator was stationed at the registrar's desk, filling out police reports while the registrar did intakes. So many people had cut themselves on broken glass that cops were told that the emergency room was running out of suture material. When officers came by to drop off the injured or simply to wash up and rest for a few minutes, nurses gave them packets of suture threads to keep in their pockets for later, in case they were the ones who needed to be stitched up.

When the pricier shops and shoe stores were cleaned out, the looters moved on to the supermarkets and bodegas. J. Walters, a local barber who had just rented out an empty store on Broadway where he intended to put a grocery store, had $40,000 in uninsured meat-slicing equipment stolen. Even a taxidermy store on Broadway was hit, leaving a trail of eyeballs in the street.

After five hours, there was little left to steal, but the worst was not over. Some of the looters, caught up in the insanity of the night, driven by the desire to destroy their neighborhood or maybe just bored, starting torching stores. After a thorough examination of the 31 neighborhoods that had suffered considerable damage during the blackout, Curvin and Porter determined that the character of the chaos in Bushwick was unique. ''The crowds on Broadway in Bushwick seemed to possess a special kind of hysteria as the evening wore on,'' they concluded in their Ford Foundation report. ''This spirit appeared to lead them as much toward destruction and burning as toward looting.''

Orange flames pierced the darkness; Bushwick was burning. At one point, two solid blocks of Broadway were in flames. As fire trucks sped along the avenue, looters pelted them from the el tracks above with rocks, bottles, bags of Goya beans. Cops tried to disperse the crowds at the various fire sites and to protect the firemen so they could do their job. After the firemen abandoned one truck to seek cover from the objects raining down on them, a few cops climbed aboard and turned the water cannon on the crowd. The force of the stream sent looters skipping as far as a half a block. Later the cops tried clearing the street by fastening a metal chain between two patrol cars and driving down either side of Broadway.

As dawn approached, exhaustion, as well as a growing sense of futility, had set in. A group of cops looked on as all the vehicles in a used-car lot were torched. The ad-hoc bazaars had already begun: a $500 color TV set was going for $135, Pro-Keds basketball shoes for $5 a pair, a $200 Peugeot 10-speed for $40.

The sun finally rose, revealing endless piles of broken glass. Disembodied mannequins littered the streets like battlefield debris. Locklear sat on a curb in a daze, as streams of blackened water pooled up in front of him and a police helicopter buzzed overhead. Not only had the crowds on Broadway not diminished, they were larger than ever. ''Ain't you guys have wives or girlfriends at home?'' he asked a group of men busy picking through the rubble. ''Ain't you tired of being out here?''

In all, more than 30 blocks of Broadway -- a distance of a mile and a half -- were devastated overnight. One-hundred thirty-four stores were cleaned out; 45 of them had been burned as well. ''I remember a merchant on Broadway whose place was looted all to hell,'' Knightly says. ''He was standing there wondering why the police didn't stop them. I didn't have an answer. I guess because there weren't enough of us to go around.'' On reflection he adds: ''There was also a reluctance to be perceived as coming down hard on the black population. The police were afraid of a race riot.''

One black store owner, a pharmacist, managed to protect his drugstore on Broadway without the help of the police. He stood guard all night with a loaded gun. When he finally left the store to go get something to eat, he returned a half-hour later to find nearly everything gone.

More than 20 fires were still burning along Broadway come Thursday morning, 10 hours after the blackout began. The stifling heat was made more oppressive by the thick black smoke that hovered over the neighborhood. ''Seeing the destruction,'' says Thomas Creegan, a redheaded veteran of the Eight-Three, ''what was most upsetting was that you'd worked with these people; you had taken care of them. And here they were, burning their own stores down. Where are you going to go come Friday? Where's that nice old lady in the tenement going to get her food?''

New York's long night of looting was followed by another hot day, with temperatures climbing into the high 90's. The power still wasn't back. The streets were littered, the skyscrapers empty, the subways idle. Con Ed had to first disconnect the entire system so that all of its component parts could be inspected for damage. Then, once everything was reconnected, the juice would need to be restored slowly in order to avoid any surges that might cause another failure. High-density areas were the first priority, which created a perverse situation: the depleted slums would be among the last to get their power back.

The looting had not been citywide. In some of the tonier areas of Manhattan, a ''party atmosphere'' (as WINS radio had put it) prevailed. Restaurants moved tables outside to escape the heat; drivers angle-parked their cars to enable diners to identify their food. At the Winter Garden Theater on Broadway, the cast members of ''Beatlemania'' picked up their acoustic instruments and led the audience in a sing-along of Beatles hits. At the Metropolitan Opera, where the National Ballet of Canada was performing, the orchestra's harpist did an impromptu solo of the old standard ''Dancing in the Dark.'' But not a single poor neighborhood escaped damage. The 1977 blackout looting was the first and only civil disturbance in the history of New York City to simultaneously encompass all five boroughs.

By Thursday morning, the city was reckoning with another problem: what to do with all the suspected looters. As The Village Voice chronicled, early every cell in the city's 73 precincts was overcrowded, as were the jails. At a few hours before dawn, with nowhere else to house prisoners, paddy wagons and squad cars had started delivering them to criminal-court buildings. Officers signed the accused in by flashlight and then went about packing them into detention pens meant to hold prisoners for an hour or two before their arraignments. Before long, at 100 Centre Street, Manhattan's House of Detention, prisoners were being stuffed into the windowless basement, where a gasoline-generated spotlight had made the already uncomfortably hot room unbearably so. Soon it was full, too. By late morning, the city's commissioner of corrections, Benajmin Malcolm, had no choice but to petition a judge to reopen the Tombs, a prison ordered closed in 1974 for its inhumane conditions.

A total of 3,076 people were arrested, a figure that dwarfed those from the city's previous two civil disorders: the 1964 rioting in Harlem and Brooklyn following the shooting of a black teenager by an off-duty white cop (373 arrested) and the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (465). Taken together, the arrests from these two disorders amounted to one-quarter of those arrested during the blackout of '77. It was the largest mass arrest in the city's history -- and surely it would have been much larger if more cops had heeded Commissioner Codd's call-up order.

As Thursday progressed, the bottleneck continued to build. Arraignments were stalled by missing paperwork and missing officers, many of whom were still out in the streets trying to prevent further damage. Evidence and witnesses able to make identifications from the dark, chaotic night were in short supply. So were the rap sheets and fingerprint records necessary for judges to set bail. The power outage knocked out communications with the central computer in Albany, where everything was stored.

As of late afternoon, with the power still out, the Bronx had worked through two cases, which was two more than Brooklyn could claim. The office of the Manhattan D.A. had prepared 250 felony complaints over the course of the day, but without lights, the judges couldn't read them. At 4:30, the courts at 100 Centre Street closed down on account of darkness.

Like the rest of the station houses in Brooklyn, the Eight-Three was told to hang onto its 133 accused looters until Central Booking was ready for them. For Sekzer it was just as well; it was going to take him days to complete the paperwork for the 30-odd men he'd collared. Most of the precinct's prisoners were wedged into the property room and an open courtyard between the cells awaiting their arraignment. ''We had them so packed in they couldn't even sit down,'' Officer Kevin Cox says. ''We went to McDonald's and threw hamburgers down to them from the second floor.'' Another cop from the Eight-Three remembers urinating on the prisoners.

Bushwick's cops were put on a ''12 on, 12 off'' work schedule. The blackout fires continued to rage through Thursday; most of the officers who weren't too busy typing up arrest reports were out protecting the firemen. Cox doesn't remember doing any additional paperwork for his three collars, whom he'd knocked down and cuffed outside a store on Broadway. It wasn't until close to a week later that he heard they were about to be arraigned. ''All of a sudden I get called to go to court,'' he says. ''They all pled guilty and were sentenced to time served, and I left.''

The logjam in the criminal-justice system caused severe overcrowding in the court-detention pens. By Saturday, civil rights groups had been alerted to the squalid conditions. Not only was there no bedding to cover the steel benches; hundreds of accused looters who sported nightstick abrasions and lacerations from broken glass were in desperate need of medical attention. Thirty-six men were in a holding pen 20 feet long and 9 feet deep in downtown Manhattan. The president of the Correction Officers' Benevolent Association warned that if something wasn't done soon, ''our prisons will explode and lives will be lost.''

Over the weekend, Corrections Commissioner Malcolm and a few fellow Corrections officials toured Brooklyn's criminal-court building, which was housing 510 detainees, roughly five times its capacity. The temperature outside was inching its way toward 100 degrees; the temperature inside was easily 120. There were puddles of urine and vomit on the floor. Malcolm, who had seen some grim prison conditions in his day, called this situation ''the worst I've ever seen'' and then promptly barred the press from entering. One of his aides compared the pens to the galley of a slave ship.

The Legal Aid Society urged the courts to grant the accused parole until their arrest records were located. When that failed, they drafted a statement calling attention to the ''abhorrent conditions'' in the cellblocks. The suspected looters, a Legal Aid lawyer charged, were victims of ''extreme misery caused by extraordinary unemployment . . . and massive cutbacks in services.'' Hundreds of protesters marched in front of Con Ed headquarters on Irving Place, waving placards that read PUT CON EDISON UNDER MARTIAL LAW, NOT THE POOR AND HUNGRY. The implication was clear: the looters were heirs to the urban rioters of the 60's, victims of the city's financial fumblings, participants in what one columnist dubbed ''the most significant class uprising in this decade.''

Or were they simply hoodlums? For most New Yorkers -- conservative and liberal alike -- it was hard to square the images of rampaging mobs that were now playing in an endless loop on local TV with some abstract notion of social protest. Some of the most unequivocal denunciations of the looting were already coming from black leaders. ''When you see a black florist on Nostrand Avenue wiped out,'' asked Woodrow Lewis, a black assemblyman from Brooklyn, ''and a supermarket on the same street suffer the same fate, both black-owned, how can I buy excuses that no jobs and poverty motivated this mob action?''

In the days after the blackout, a damp, acrid smell permeated Bushwick. Fire-damaged buildings sloughed off big chunks of debris. In the rubble-strewn streets, people filled shopping carts with abandoned packages of meat.

At first, many merchants hadn't even bothered returning to their cleaned-out shops. Very few of them had insurance; nearly all of those who did had ''civil disobedience'' clauses in their policies, which precluded claims for losses incurred during riots.

On Sunday, July 18, four days after the looting started, two teenagers and a 12-year-old started a fire in the basement of an old knitting factory. A few years earlier, the Fire Department had urged the city to demolish the five-story building, which had already been the site of two three-alarm fires. Instead, it was to be converted into a low-income apartment complex. But the fiscal crisis arrived before renovation could begin, and the abandoned building was now being used as a bingo hall as well as a hangout for local junkies.

Fires, of course, were nothing new to Bushwick. Local firemen spray-painted signs on abandoned buildings. Two intersecting diagonal lines, an X, meant the structure was unsound; don't go in. They were like tombstones for the doomed residents of a town confronting a deadly epidemic.

The fire in the abandoned knitting factory spread with startling speed. Before long, it had progressed from a three-alarm fire to a full-borough-alarm fire, the equivalent of 10 alarms. Flames were literally jumping across the street. A fire truck's windshield melted. Brick facades tumbled and wooden houses collapsed, burying cars underneath them. More than 55 fire companies, including 13 from Manhattan, were summoned to help, as were the cops on duty at the Eight-Three. All of the neighborhood's fire hydrants had already been opened by neighborhood kids looking for some relief from the unrelenting heat, which drastically reduced the water pressure for the firemen.

Cox and his partner were among the cops told to drive down the center of the street looking for survivors. Through their windshield, they could see the flames above their heads. When they emerged, having found no one, the paint on their car had blistered.

Firemen managed to get the blaze under control in about three hours, but by then it had destroyed 23 buildings in a four-block area, including a Methodist church. It was the city's biggest fire since 1963. As night fell, the Salvation Army was serving coffee to cops, the Red Cross was trying to find temporary housing for the 200 newly homeless and scavengers were picking through the rubble left behind.

A decade earlier, the rioting that nearly destroyed Detroit and Newark awakened America to the need to address the dire condition of its ghettos. But New York's 1977 blackout looting only seemed to confirm the country's worst suspicions about the beleaguered city. After declining to visit post-blackout New York, President Carter denied its request to be declared a major disaster area. The Washington Post called the looting ''an indictment of the state of the city, its government and its people.'' The magazine Christianity Today suggested that God had sent his judgment on a city that had turned away from him. ''The lack of electricity lit up the reality of people's minds and hearts,'' the magazine wrote. ''That's what people are like when separated from light and the light.''

Yet even as the nation was busy heaping scorn on New York, the city's regeneration was already under way. In the weeks after the blackout, a parade of columnists paid their respects to battered Bushwick. ''It is here, in the dirt and the smells and the heat,'' Jimmy Breslin wrote in The Daily News, ''that New York must struggle to keep a crucial part of its city from falling apart.'' Martin Gottlieb and a team of reporters produced a moving series in the same newspaper on Bushwick's woes, and the neighborhood became a requisite campaign stop for New York's 1977 mayoral candidates.

The 1980's and 90's brought block associations, urban planners, social workers and successful experiments in community policing to Bushwick. Charred storefronts slowly disappeared, and the lower middle class started creeping back. Gradually, the neighborhood's identity began to change. Several hundred two- and three-family homes, apartments and a day-care center are now rising on the abandoned site of the old Rheingold brewery. Once a metaphor for the city's self-destructiveness, Bushwick has become a quiet emblem of New York's halting yet determined rebirth.

Photos: Societal breakdown: Broadway, Brooklyn, during the 1977 New York City blackout.; ''A special kind of hysteria'': One hundred thirty-four stores were looted along a mile-and-a-half stretch of Broadway in Brooklyn during the '77 blackout.; Tipping point: Few linked '77's rampaging mobs with any notion of social protest. (Photographs by Tyrone Dukes/The New York Times)

Jonathan Mahler is writing a book on New York and baseball in the 70's. His last article for the magazine was about the Lubavitch Hasidic sect.